THE KINDERGARTEN TEACHER

Nira (Sarit Larry) is a kindergarten teacher in Tel Aviv, married, with two almost grown-up children; in the evenings she attends a poetry class. Then she notices that five-year-old Yoav (Avi Shnaidman) in her group sometimes stops, paces up and down and says: “I have a poem.” What he then recites she considers accomplished, and she begins writing down his verses, as otherwise only his nanny does. In the poetry class she performs them as her own. Fascination turns into obsession: Nira wants to save the boy’s talent from a world that, in her view, does not deserve it – from his father, a restaurant owner, from school, from Israel. In “The Kindergarten Teacher” (Israel, 2014), Nadav Lapid tells of a woman who holds art to be more important than anything else.

Lapid, whose film “Policeman” was awarded in Locarno in 2011, often places the camera at the child’s eye level and moves so close to the characters that the perspective tips. It premiered in the Semaine de la Critique in Cannes in 2014. “The Kindergarten Teacher” was shown at Around the World in 14 Films in Berlin in 2014.

Shown at the 2014 edition of Around the World in 14 Films.

All films 2014 · Film Archive